Ethics and technology in modern society

Ethics and Technology

Successfully combating plagiarism can be a very difficult thing in this technological age. Different software products and companies like turnitin.com can be effective in weeding out essays that have been culled from sources available online, in many books, and in a database of other student essays. Subscription to such services are common in many universities, and the more widespread their use becomes the more effective such services will be (as there will be more and more essays in the database to compare work to). But although these methods are effective at catching students who simply copy their papers from other sources, they do nothing to prevent people from obtaining original content by paying others to do their work for them. In order to combat this, universities would have to mandate extensive in-class writing assignments, and these could be compared to essays written out of class and research papers to determine if styles, skill, and ultimately authorship of the various pieces was the same.

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Ensuring the rigid adherence to applicable laws ad ethical standards is essential in competitive intelligence, yet it can also b difficult to achieve. This is true not only because of the temptation involved in over-stepping certain bounds to gain deeper (and unfair) understandings of competitors and consumers, but also some issue can be slightly unclear as to the ethical imperatives at play. As the leader of the competitive intelligence team at a major software company, I would attempt to create an environment where ethical and legal behavior was practiced by defining the primary objective of the team in a way that mandated such compliance. At the heart of competitive intelligence is research, and at the heart of any research there must be a question. If the question put to the competitive intelligence team were, "how can we make a product that consumers want to buy?," and if this question were at the forefront of every action, there would be no need for unethical behavior. For an issue like product design, we would not need to try to copy another company's interface, but would instead study why that interface was popular with consumers, and attempt to emulate and accentuate those same features. The same principle applies in many other areas of competitive intelligence research; having a shred objective with inherent values is a great ethical motivator.

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